New Delhi: As part of its bid to reduce road accidents and accident-related casualties across the country and to improve road safety, the Centre is looking to collaborate with private players. Nitin Gadkari, the Central Minister for Road Transport and Highways, said that ‘public-private collaboration and regular efforts will help improve road safety in India, consequently reducing road fatalities.
Addressing a virtual webinar on private financing for road safety, the Highway minster urged private players to contribute to creating social awareness and responsibility towards road safety. Besides this, he also urged them to utilize their CSR funds appropriately for addressing all concerns of road safety in India.
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He then reiterated the Centre’s commitment to achieve 50% reduction in accident-related deaths by 2025, followed by zero accident-related fatalities by the year 2030. According to him, road accidents put a social-economic burden on society and the country as a whole. He requested all private sector players to proactively come forward to support such initiatives. The corpus generated through social contribution would be utilized to finance projects like zero fatality, along with other road safety strategies on a countrywide scale, he claimed.
Also, in a written reply submitted in the RajyaSabha, he informed that the government has implemented ETC systems using passive RFID technology across the country for making tolling efficient and to ensure seamless traffic management.
Moreover, for promoting fee payment through the digital mode and to allow seamless passage through toll plazas, the central government has declared all toll plaza lanes on national highways as FASTag lanes, with effect from the midnight of mid- February 2021.
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Due to this, the overall FASTag penetration on national highway FASTag lanes has reached around 96 per cent, which also helps in reducing fuel consumption and travel time, the minister said.
